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So I was just sitting around thinking about some possible sink ideas, and this is what I've come up with so far (these aren't all mine).
Possible Gold Sinks
Gambling - Who doesn't love gambling?
Repairs - Like off of D1 and D2. Somebody had also mentioned that sorcs have no worries of repairs, so sorc orbs could have some sort of durability in a magic form.
Vendors - The basics, such as potions, keys, armor, etc.
Mercenaries - If they are risking their lives for you, you should pay them at least! Personally I liked the idea of a constant gold drain from mercs.
Item Charges - Make these worthwhile again.
Bribing - You could bribe NPC's for information, entrance into an area, etc.
Personal Item - The one suggested by ryojirosan, in that you can use gold to add attributes to a unique weapon only for your character.
Respeccing - Well since it will be in D3, this could also serve as a gold sink. For those who fear an 'unlimited' amount of respeccing (say it costs a lot of gold, but you can do it infinitely), you could have a limited amount that still costs gold to use.
Travel - It could be a long walk, and Warriv may not be around for a free trip. You could also pay for safe passage through an otherwise dangerous area.
Socketing - Socketing is always useful.
Imbue - Another quest that could be used for a sink. It should be expensive enough though that it has no advantages of just searching for rares.
Ingredients - Allow the vendors to carry some crafting items.
Spell Items - Like the scrolls from D1, you could have an expendable item in your inventory for casting certain spells (they don't have to be spells from the classes), or they could boost your spells.
Currency Upgrades - 5000 gold too much for your inventory? Trade it in for 5 rubies at 1000 each. This doesn't serve as a gold sink necessarily, but it helps gold be used as one by saving yourself room.
Storage System - As tmeh mentioned in his thread, you could pay gold to use/upgrade a shared stash for your characters.
Clan Benefits - For a price, you can buy services for your guild. Perhaps a shared stash, or a clan banner.
Style - Tattoos, armor design, etc. This could double as a gold sink and a way of making yourself unique.
It doesn't need to be just one either. Actually I'd assume it to be better to have lots of places to spend gold.
Man I am really for the ingredients, storage system, and style <--- ima huge fable fan
Ingredents-- It could be set up geographical maybe, like you would find diamonds in Africa and emeralds in England, acctually have a jewler that specificly sells jewels and runes.
Storage system--It would be a little more reallistic, how many times have you said, "hay(insert loved one here) I left that $10 on the (insert favorite "leave it here so they can find it place.") lol Who says your chars aint buddies and share equipment on the regular.
Style-- IMO this has been Extreamly lacking, I understand your proud of your programing design but come on not everyone looks alike, however I agree with the current armor/weapon, I like that unique items have specific colors and rares have the abuility to have a color.
The easiest way is having an indefinitely expandable central stash. Each new set of slots costs more than the last.
And no gold caps.
And no gold loss on death.
Particularly the last one is killer. You'd think it's not, because it reduces the amount of gold, but it doesn't work that way. People don't want to a resource that will evaporate over time when there are others that don't. Hardcore doesn't have that problem, but then you run into the gold cap as a slightly less detrimental but still fatal aspect. Together, they destroy the value of gold.
Heck, might not even NEED a gold sink... As long as it doesn't decay/cap, and inflates slower than items, it's fine.
i also support Currency upgrade as well, if you cant carry it, put it in rubies. physicly it dont make sence bc in reality you could hold more gold that rubies but it makes for a more fun investment system
Many people on other threads complain about "too many gold sinks", but I don't see why this is bad. I mean, look at d2. There were close to zero gold sinks. The was gambling and reparing ubber gear, and that's about it. And merc revive when merc's die from being too dumb.
If there are gold sinks, lots of them, people will have more incentive to farm gold. Plus, people have to think hard about how they spend it.
LoL when I started reading this thread there were a couple of things I was going to mention until I realized you listed pretty much everything I was going to say, good job!
But something that can't be overlooked is how unbalanced the system is for selling items to vendors in d2. My superior grim wand with +2 poison explosion and +1 skeleton mages gets me 35k gold, but my superunique megasword of pure awesome gets me 11k. They need to remove the cap for sale value and significiantly reduce/buff up the value of items based on their actual usefulness/rarity. If iirc D1 actually had the system pretty well-balanced, because the imfamous Godly Plate of the Whale sold for more gold than you could even carry in an inventory, so I don't understand how they messed that up. It seems like they didn't even care about gold from the very beginning in D2.
Having that staple currency will also give people incentive to hunt for items and such instead of depending entirely on a few lucky finds. They could grind their way to fortune, like true Western Culture capitalism LOLz.
The best ideas here are Gambling, which we all know works very well great, and Customisation - which I think everyone will want and has zero* impact on actual gameplay. It would have to be expensive though. Maybe unlockables through rare acheivements would be a prerequisite? Everyone loves customisation of their characters and it seems natural this could be an effective sink.
I don't think that D3 actually needs a gold sink. I think they should make gold a valuable trading resource. Possibly similar to WoW's economy where gold is actually worth something. I didn't even mind when millions of SoJs were duped and used as currency. Then FG came out. Personally, ForumGold ruined diablo 2 for me. Nobody would trade for items anymore, only FG.
Blizzard needs to create a currency for D3, and making gold rare and needed to actually do things in the game would do this. I know that diablo is based a lot upon item for item trading, but that can co-exist with a currency as well, and if there is no currency, someone will make some, such as FG did.
I thought of something. Let's say you find a godly item like CoA or Tyreals or w/e. So you get it and [chuckles chuckles] it has zero durability...and you have to pay some outragous cost in gold to repair it because that sneeky blacksmith will only repair it to full durability. We kind of have this disappointment anyway with lev requirements and such, so why not millions of gold tacked on just to spur us to collect gold?
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